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Scribes Get Choked Up During Haiti Coverage

Haiti’s earthquake coverage is bringing an element of reporting that many reporters and correspondents don’t usually have to cope with — breaking down in tears on air.

Fox News’s Steve Harrigan (who the network often sends to war zones) got choked up during Shepard Smith’s show; Smith took over and explained how hard these things are for journalists to cover. Watch the video below.

An excerpt of Smith’s on-air remarks: “If you’ve ever been to a horrible disaster, if you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to do so, it’s often that sense that people elsewhere cannot have that brings you back to that place. For instance, New York, 9/11 – it had a smell; it was metallic, it was fuel, it had its own thing and you’d never forget it. New Orleans had its own thing, similarly. Haiti is going to be, for everybody who covered it and everybody who lived through it, the smell of death and it will not go away for weeks or months or years because you see the process of excavating – it’s very slow.”

In another example, NPR’s Jason Beaubien had to pause to choke back tears during his recent live report from Haiti today.

While describing a little girl covered in bandages laying on a table, he stopped for a few seconds, caught his breath, and seemed disoriented, his voice cracking, and breathed deeply before finishing his report.